Love at the Speed of Email (12 page)

Michelle had no idea what to say to that one.

My mother, who had also suffered through my narration of
this docudrama for months, had no such inhibitions.

“Just go already,” she said. “It’s about time you got
yourself sorted out.”

* * *

It had been six months since I was captured so completely by
two pages about a stranger’s birthday party. Four months since Ryan and I had
first exchanged letters.
At least three months since I
realized that if I didn’t meet Ryan I would always wonder.
And wondering
was the last thing I wanted. I felt torn between what Jason was offering me –
marriage, the beauty and safety of a warm and constant affection – and the
allure of the challenge and adventure I associated with Ryan.

I had spent more emotional energy on my image of Ryan than
had been aroused by some of the people I’d actually dated.

Perhaps if I could put a face to that mystery, I thought, it
would throw my feelings for Jason into sharp relief and the way forward would
look clearer.

This reasoning felt faulty even as I was formulating it, but
I couldn’t figure out exactly why. After all, choice is all about contrast,
isn’t it? How could I figure out if I loved Jason the way he so wanted me to
love him, in a vacuum?

But how could I tell Jason now, several months into what was
undeniably a serious relationship, that I needed to cross an international border
to go on a blind date with a stranger – a stranger, incidentally, who wouldn’t
exactly know he was on a blind date and probably had no idea of the depth of my
interest?

I couldn’t.

I did and said a lot of things during these months that I am
not proud of, but this one is near the top of the list. Not even the knowledge
that I agonized over this choice and that it wasn’t motivated by malice redeems
it much. It simply underscores the fact that the way I decided to deal with
this dilemma was the culmination of a series of preceding, smaller decisions
made in weakness.

It was cowardly, after our early and blithe joking about
marriage, not to be transparent with Jason when I started to have more serious
doubts about whether we would have a future together. Or, more to the point
since Jason had made his intentions perfectly clear, whether we
should
have a future together.
 

It was cowardly, when I began to feel pressured in a
self-created routine of nightly phone calls not to simply say something like,
“Jason, I love talking to you, but I think we’ve moved a bit fast to build on
what is so far a shaky foundation. Could we perhaps slow it down a bit? Maybe
we should start by talking every two or three days?”

It was cowardly, instead, to start to let his calls go to
voice mail or his text messages stay unanswered.
(For a
little while, anyway.
Because the internal tension engendered by not
answering the phone was never eased until I had returned the call or text and
subtly re-ascertained two basic facts: that he still loved me and that he
wasn’t angry.)

It takes two to tango, and Jason did his bit to contribute
to the unhealthy communication dynamics we established. But my part was being
so driven by a need to be loved by him – even when I was not at all sure that I
loved
him
as he wanted – that I
avoided conflict with him at any cost.

Vancouver,
Canada

I told everyone involved (Jason and Ryan included) that I
was going to Vancouver for work, braved LAX on a sunny Friday morning, and
landed in the city of my birth on a cold, rainy afternoon. As I walked into the
arrivals area I was suddenly desperately nervous and acutely aware that
although I felt I knew Ryan’s mind fairly well, I had no idea which body housed
that mind. I didn’t even know the color of his hair or how tall he was.

He knew what
I
looked like. Early on I’d decided that if there was zero chemistry on either
side it would be better if we learned that sooner rather than later, but I’d
never been able to figure out a way to subtly ask him to send me a photo. So
I’d done the next best thing. I’d mass emailed my entire mailing list with
several photographs of me from the past year (me in Kenya, me in San Francisco,
me smiling prettily) with the sole aim of letting him check me out. He had not
reciprocated, but he hadn’t stopped emailing me either, which I figured meant
he hadn’t ruled me out.

Either that or he was markedly less calculating than I
suspected he was capable of being and had no idea at all what I was up to.

“I’ll find
you
,”
he had cockily written the day before our rendezvous when I pointed out that
I’d never seen a photo of him and would have no way of locating him in the
arrivals lounge.

I had to wait twelve long minutes before he approached from
behind. He turned out to be tall, with curly blond hair and thoughtful blue
eyes, and much more diffident than the Ryan of the written word.

We hugged a hello and almost instantly I felt a weight lift.
No Technicolor fireworks had gone off – the sort that had always let me know
before that I was caught hook, line, and sinker until the story played itself
out – and I thought of Jason, smiled, and was relieved. The disappointment
didn’t come until later. I went to bed that night tired and cleanly empty,
feeling freer.

I never did come right out and try to explain to Ryan why I
was really up in Vancouver. I couldn’t articulate it in any way that made it
sound remotely sensible, even to myself. So Ryan and I wandered a wet city for
the weekend and talked instead of humanitarian work, restlessness,
rootlessness
, and writing.

We talked of adventure and of home.

And I watched him watching me.

For the first time, I really understood what can make people
nervous when they are faced with a psychologist. There are at least ten levels
to Ryan and I saw only five of them, at most, that weekend. He was much more
inscrutable and guarded in person than he was on paper. I knew that there were
plenty of things he was thinking through that I couldn’t even guess at, but one
thing he couldn’t corral completely were his eyes. He
watched
me, a small smile on his lips, as if he were both baffled
and amused by what he saw.

Which when I thought about it seemed entirely fair. I
certainly had no grounds to complain about anyone being guarded or confused.

After a weekend of watching, rain, art galleries, and long
talks over Canadian beer, I was able to get back on the plane with the mystery
removed and a new friendship cemented, knowing that if Ryan had been the only
obstacle standing in the way of loving Jason, that obstacle was gone.

Except – and this took me three more messy months to figure
out – Ryan hadn’t been the only obstacle.

I had really wanted him to be. I agonized over what was
wrong with me, what prevented me from loving such a fundamentally decent man
who cared so much for me. But in the end, I realized that if I stayed with
Jason it would be in large part because of fear. Fear of hurting someone I
cared for very deeply. Fear of disappointing him and making him angry. Fear
that I couldn’t trust my own instincts – that I was being hasty and turning my
face away from the possibility of great happiness or that I was simply
incapable of the sort of commitment Jason wanted.
 

Fear that I would never find someone else who loved me and
that I would ultimately end up alone.

But in the end, I knew that regardless of whether I was
making the biggest mistake of my life in saying no to Jason, being scared of
all of these things was just not a good enough reason to get married, that I
would be doing us both wrong if I said yes.

Baltimore,
USA

Three years later I looked at the last line I’d written in
my latest letter to Mike: “When it came right down to it, my primary motivation
for writing my first essay was to catch someone's attention. Yes, translate
that to: to impress a guy.”

So how much more of this tale
was
I willing to share at this stage? What else would need to be
added as an addendum to put it into context?

Perhaps that it had been almost three years since Jason and
I had parted ways.

That I hadn’t dated anyone else since.

That I started writing the essays largely because it was
fun, but I kept writing them even when it wasn’t nearly as much fun because I
sensed that it was an important discipline for me to cultivate – that in the
face of a constant kaleidoscope of airports and faces it would serve me well to
learn to narrow my focus to a moment. To take that moment for what it was and
to think carefully about what else it could be.

That over time, without my even really noticing
,
writing had become a spiritual discipline – one way for me
to snatch breaths from beneath the waterfall of life.

That now, like the chemicals on a photographic negative, it
is the keyboard that helps me define my experiences. On my best days, a jumble
of moments, like so many bright pixels, coalesce into something vibrant and
evocative as I type. Often I feel as if I have not understood anything of what
an experience has really meant to me until I have anchored it in text.

No, apart from the “key lessons learned about long-distance
relationships” that I’d already provided in my first email, I wasn’t ready to
lay all this out before Mike. Not yet.
 

What to say then?
 

“Why do I write essays and post them online?” I wrote. “It
only took one essay to discover that I really did enjoy writing them and that
people on my mailing list really liked them. The essays became something that
helped me feel connected to people back home and helped them feel that they
knew some of what was going on in my life. For me, they also became an
important writing discipline, an important living discipline.”

“I must go to sleep. I’m exhausted, which I blame in part on
my sister for keeping me up talking too late last night and in part on you for
keeping me up emailing the night before,” I finished. “I’m heading back to L.A.
tomorrow. I know you're off island-hopping again soon and will have
intermittent access to email. So safe travels, and when you're near a net
connection and a keyboard, write me more
rambly
emails.”

Los
Angeles, USA

I returned to L.A. late the next night to find a dusty
bedroom and a knee-high stack of junk mail. The apartment was blessedly silent.
A note on the fridge informed me that my
flatmate
,
Travis, was in Las Vegas for three more days, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I rather desperately hoped that when he returned it would be in a different
state of mind from the one he’d been in for most of the previous eight months.
I dropped my luggage in the hallway and headed straight upstairs to bed,
planning to sleep until forever.

The following morning, however, found me awake at six,
exhausted and cursing jet lag for being such an efficient alarm clock. The dawn
light was just starting to filter into my bedroom and I lay still and warm for
a moment and listened to the lambent splash of the fountain outside my window.
In that tiny window of peace, fragments from the previous month came to visit.

A workshop participant’s story, confided in hushed and
hurried tones during a coffee break, of how her husband was abusing her.
Another participant’s glance sideways as he relayed how his wife
had been killed in a motorcycle accident just two months earlier.

As I swung my feet out of bed I began the process of easing
back into my life in California. The time away
receded
just a little as my bare toes met carpet, and I felt guilty as I saw it go. But
I hadn’t yet learned the trick of keeping two worlds equally close, and
California was here, now.

At 7 a.m. on a Sunday, the streets of Pasadena were almost
empty, but Noah’s Bagel Shop was warm and bright against the gray skies
outside. I ordered coffee and a bagel, only then remembering that it would be
the first thing I’d eaten in almost twenty-four hours.

I sat in the corner on a high stool and stared out the
window. Past the glass, a man paged through the paper with a frown, his foot
anchoring the end of the leash. Golden ears framed two brown eyes that watched
eagerly for any sign of affection. The dog’s gaze didn’t shift in the five
minutes it took me to eat the bagel, but no affection was forthcoming.

Beside me, an elegant silver-haired woman spilled the hot
water for her tea across the bench. It spread in a warm river toward a young
man’s paper, its headlines shouting at us about casualties in Iraq, and she
blushed as he jumped up to get napkins.

“I was worried about that,” she confided to the room at
large. “That was the worst thing I could think of that would happen to me
today.”

I smiled politely and told her to look on the bright side, that
since the worst had already happened, her day could only get better.

As I glanced back out the window to check whether the man
had petted the dog yet, it struck me as odd that there is a place in this world
where someone can say without any hint of self-deprecation that that worst
thing she could imagine happening to her that day was to spill the water for
her tea. Instead of feeling annoyed, I felt safe.
 

I congratulated myself on how smoothly my readjustment to
normal life was progressing as I got up and wandered into the gourmet
supermarket next door, where I stood so long in front of the milk selection
that a clerk approached me with gentle trepidation and asked if he could help
me. I was tempted to hand him my basket and tell him to do my shopping. Instead
I smiled the enigmatic smile of someone who is so preoccupied by important
thoughts that she can be immobilized with no warning in the milk aisle, reached
out my hand, and took the first carton I touched.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I wasn’t, though. Not completely. I’d made it only halfway
through the caramel latte I’d ordered and I was starting to feel sick. I
couldn’t find sausages fit for pasta sauce, and I suddenly lost patience with
the whole process. Dropping my coffee into the trash I headed for the checkout
with just three bananas, raspberries, red chili paste, and the milk. Maybe
shopping would be easier later in the day.

Outside Noah’s the man turned the page of his paper and the
dog inched forward, bottom vibrating, shiny black nose almost touching a knee,
but the man didn’t look up or reach out. On the other side of the fence that
separated us, I dropped my bag of groceries to the pavement, propped my foot on
the low railing and bent to fiddle with my shoe. When the dog spared me a
glance, I wiggled my fingers at him, a covert offer. Tail moving in
acknowledgement, he licked my hand in one furtive, warm swipe. Then his gaze
returned to the back of the paper. It was clearly not my attention that he
wanted.

I wiped my hand on my jeans, picked up the bag, and headed
for the car.

Sometimes arriving home from a work trip will fill me with a
sudden, sweet burst of energy and the sense of a fresh page turning. I’ve
learned to ride this energy as far as it will take me when it
come
– the gym, the grocery store, the washing machine. That
flat fatigue that follows extended travel is often tempered if the house is
clean, my suitcases are unpacked and I have something to eat when it hits.

This time there was no sweet surge of energy. The apartment
felt empty and foreign. I couldn’t even summon the strength to hoist my heavy
suitcases up the stairs, and with Travis gone there was no one else to care if
they stayed in the living room, spilling their contents across the carpet. I
sighed every time I thought about packing for my next flight to Vancouver in a
week. I ate bananas, soup, and toasted pita bread for two days before I could
be bothered to brave the grocery store again. It was all I could do to get up,
go to the office, and keep track of the radio interviews about my novel that
I’d told my publisher I’d do when I returned.

Actually, I didn’t always do that, either. Two mornings
after getting back, the phone rang just as I was getting out of the shower. I
grabbed a towel and ran to fetch it. By the time I picked it up I was at least
awake enough not to tell Luke Zuckerman from some station in Ohio that (1) I
had totally forgotten we were scheduled to talk live on air and (2) I wasn't
wearing any clothes.

* * *

I was feeling more at home in the apartment and in my own
skin by the time Travis got back from Las Vegas, which was good because I
needed that extra energy to focus on him.

When he first moved in, Travis had been the most
entertaining of housemates to share the apartment with, part stand-up comic and
part debate partner. By the time we’d been living together for almost two
years, we had settled into a relationship that was vaguely reminiscent of
siblings.
 

We shared the shopping and kept a running tally of money
owed on the refrigerator door. We cooked for each other. We sat in the living
room together sometimes on Saturdays, me writing and him working on the latest
short-film project he hoped would be his ticket to making it big in Hollywood.
We had a lot of mock arguments and occasionally some real ones. He got cranky
at me for not doing enough of the cleaning. I got cranky at him for turning the
TV up too loud late at night. Way more often than not, however, our exchanges
ended in laughter. Then, slowly, subtly, things started to shift.

Even now, armed with hindsight, it’s hard to know when it
started.

Travis had always carried
a certain
energy with him, an intensity. I can’t put my finger on exactly when and how
that intensity stopped being just healthy fuel for his creativity and started
herding his mind toward darker places, but about eight months earlier, right
around my thirty-first birthday, we had started laughing less.

Around this time, Travis was deep in the throes of finishing
the editing of his second short film, a disturbing tale of choice and
consequences. Because he was an audiovisual consultant for large corporate
shows, his work schedule had always been erratic, but now he stopped working
altogether to focus on wrapping the project and start writing the script for what
he hoped would be his first feature film. He sat in front of his computer until
all hours of the night, going over that short film frame by frame. He covered
the south wall of his bedroom entirely with flip-chart paper, marked a giant
story arc on it, and started sketching out the plot he had in mind.

After being up until four or five every night, he’d often
sleep until midday and then be flat and distracted in the evenings. As the
summer wore on, he slowly became more and more tightly wound and less and less
fun to live with. It seemed that all the genuine cheerfulness was being leached
out of his intensity and replaced with a simmering hostility.

He started to take everything more personally. He bantered
less and ranted more. His colleagues, other friends, the world in general –
they all became the subject of extended vitriolic diatribes over the kitchen
bench while one of us cooked dinner. One night he yelled at me over an innocent
flippant remark. It was an attack that left me stunned, hurt, and confused.

For the first time, I started to think seriously about
moving out, something I was loath to do. I’d lived in that apartment longer
than I’d lived in any other place, and the second half of the year was booked
solid with international travel and the book release. Where would I find the
time and energy to move?

I thought it would pass. I mean, what artist
hasn’t
had periods of deep immersion in
serious projects when life looked grim and he felt decidedly unbalanced? Travis
had wanted to be a director since he was a little boy. Films were his life
passion. But right on the cusp of turning thirty, living in a city where so
many glossy teenagers walk red carpets, he was feeling an incredible amount of
self-induced pressure.

Then in August of that year, while I was away in Turkey for
a month, Travis lost his internal footing.

* * *

He was starring in a reality TV show, Travis explained to me
less than ten minutes after I walked through the door the night that I returned
from Turkey. He had been starring in this show ever since he was a little boy,
since he first decided that he wanted to be a director, since it first became
apparent that he was autistic.

“But you’re
not
autistic,” I said that night, too stunned at first to be anything but confused
by what he was saying.

“I
am
,” he
insisted, flicking a lock of red hair off his forehead with a nervous sweep of
a wrist. Always lean, he was thinner than he had been when I left, and pale,
with dark shadows under his eyes. “I’ve done all this research online. All the
symptoms fit.”

“Travis, I worked with autistic kids for six months after
graduating from high school,” I said. “You’re
not
autistic.”

“I have
Asperger’s
,” he said.

“No you don’t,” I said. “You are perfectly capable of
empathy and reading social cues related to sarcasm and irony. You choose to
ignore
social cues sometimes, but you
can read them.”
 

“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “You’re all saying
something like that. But I know the truth now.”

“The truth about the TV show?”
I
asked hesitantly.

“
Duh
,” he looked
at me as if he’d expected more. “Kid with autism grows up wanting to become a
director and makes it big in Hollywood.
Great
story for reality TV! Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. I
know
you do.”

“I don’t,” I said and then tried a different tack. “Tell me
how you figured it out.”

“They made a mistake,” he said, triumphant. “I already
suspected, you know. But then I went out for dinner
weeks
ago with D.J. and there were lights and a camera crew
outside. When we walked past they followed us. And, inside, there was a famous
director sitting at a table nearby. D.J. denied the whole thing, but I totally
figured it out.”

“This is L.A.,” I reminded him – he who’d worked as an extra
on more movies than I could count. “There are camera crews everywhere.”

“
Exactly
,” he
said.

Dead end.

“You said you already suspected by that point,” I said.
“When did you
first
start to
suspect?”

“Right after you left I went to a bachelor party,” he said.
“They put something in my drink. I’m telling you, it really messed with my
head.”

“What was it?” I asked.

Again
that look
in his eyes, that
look of mingled suspicion and pity at my stupidity.

“I don’t
know
,” he
said. “I didn’t see them put it in there. I wouldn’t have drunk it if I did,
would I?”

“Did you take anything else?”

“No,” he said.
“Only pot.”

“Only
pot
?”

“Only pot, no cocaine or anything else this time, I swear,”
he said, misunderstanding my question.

“Maybe the pot—”

“I always do pot,” he said. “I do it here all the time.”

He did? How had I never smelled it in the house or realized
he was high? How dumb
was
I?

“Pot can make you paranoid,” I said, using that word out
loud for the first time.